


Spinning in Infinity

by iiii



Series: Incidents in Transit [10]
Category: Firefly, Supernatural
Genre: Exposition, F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-05-02
Updated: 2016-05-02
Packaged: 2018-06-05 21:55:25
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,168
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6725068
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/iiii/pseuds/iiii
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>“What?”</p><p>“You really think that’s them down there.  That the heroes of some grizzled goblin-gabble have made their appearance in the hold of my ship.”</p>
            </blockquote>





	Spinning in Infinity

**Author's Note:**

  * Inspired by [No Escape From Reality](https://archiveofourown.org/works/771211) by [MollyC](https://archiveofourown.org/users/MollyC/pseuds/MollyC). 



When Dean woke, River was gone.

He went out into the lounge and found the floor space there filled with crayons, paper, and small children.  Sam and Zoe were sprawled in opposite corners of the couch, looking cheerful and very much at their ease.  Sam tossed Dean a box of crackers.

“Mornin’, Sunshine.  You missed breakfast.”

“What time is it?”

“Almost ten.”

“Huh.”  Dean set the crackers back on the table and went to use the plumbing.

When Dean emerged he flopped in a chair and applied himself to the crackers.  “You seen River?”

“Aw, did she skip out before you got her number?”

Dean rolled his eyes at Sam and turned to Zoe.  “She said something last night about this guy Badger, that you came to get us for him?”

“Any curiosity you got about Badger, you best put to the Captain.”

“She said he had two faces,” Dean told Sam.

“He’s a sharp dealer, all right, and not full candid, but I don’t know as I’d quite call him two-faced,” Mal said from the hold stairs.

“What do you know about him?” Dean asked.

Mal picked his way around the children and their drawings.  “He squats on Persephone.  Calls himself a ‘businessman’ like it’s something to brag on.  He is much attached to his fine bowler hat.  More to the point, he floated a commission to collect an object from a location in space.  We took the job, and here you are.”

“Any idea why?”

“Nope.  Badger’s got his fingers in an awful lot of pies.  Wouldn’t be the first time he’s been shipping people.”

“Wait, what?”

“It’s a hard cold ‘verse with ugly things in it,” Mal said, and rattled up the stairs toward the galley.

Sam and Dean turned to Zoe expectantly.

“Don’t you boys have reading to do?” she said, and got down on the floor to inspect the children’s drawings.

 

* * *

 

Sam took a break mid-afternoon to stretch his legs and found himself helping Victor push his project into the middle of the hold.  Dean wandered in as Victor was rolling out the tool cart.

"What is it?" Dean asked.

"It's my exhibition piece."

"No, I mean, what is it?"

Stripped of the tarpaulin, it was a dome of openwork metallic tracery supported by a waist-high circular base, ten feet in diameter.  Beneath the dome was an array of variously colored spheres, large and small, smooth and rough, each supported at chest height by a wire upright.

"Oh.  It's an orrery.  A mechanical representation of the ‘Verse.  We are just about… there,” Victor said, indicating a point in space near the big red ball.  He flipped a switch on the ledge and set it all in motion.  At Sam’s request Victor named the principal suns, clear incandescent balls of white, red, yellow.  The outermost sun was blue, and opaque.  Victor explained that its planets orbited in a plane almost 90 degrees off the ecliptic, which made mechanical workings beyond ungainly - so he'd made the Blue Dragon a holographic projector.  The trick there, he said, was to get the textures right, so that the holographic planets worked visually with the solid ones.  The base of each inner sun was surrounded by a nest of concentric gears, which controlled the rotation of its attendant planets and protostars.  Some of the satellites had satellites of their own, fixed to clockwork epicycles on the larger gears.  Most of the protostars, Victor said, had orbits non-trivially angled out of the ecliptic.  He went on at some length about the substrate of risers hidden in the base that kept their relative motions accurate, and about his current difficulties in making them work smoothly.  Victor switched it off again.

“Exhibition piece?” Sam asked.

“I aim to get apprenticed to a fancywork artificer in the Core.  Best way for someone like me to do something like that is to catch a master’s eye at one of the exhibitions.  So I mean to have this fit to display at the Osiris Pantechnicon next quarter-day.  If no one takes me on there, we try the Festival on Londinium, then the Bernadette Bazaar and the rest.  Mal agreed to do one full run of the circuit, and if I haven’t found a place by then, I apprentice to my uncle on Whittier.  He’s a boatwright, does a bit of joinery on the side.  It’ll be a certificate at least.”  While talking, Victor had opened the rolling tool cart, unlatched the dome and collapsed it over to one side, removed the protostar Heinlein and its satellites from their uprights, unshipped the uprights, and prized loose the gear plate that controlled their workings.

“Cool,” Dean said.  “You want any help?”

“It’s all got to be my own work, but I’d be glad if you wanted to stay by and hand me tools.  River said she might be by later, see if she can’t tell me what’s going wrong with this gear plate.”

“Thought it had to be your own work.”

“It does.  Taking counsel from your seniors is the whole point of an apprenticeship, though.  They like to see that you can take advice, and that you can tell what advice is worth taking.”

“Well, you gear monkeys have fun,” Sam said, and headed toward his berth.

“You too, bookworm.”

Dean sat with Victor for the rest of the day.  He found out a lot about what the kids were using for wrenches these days, but River didn’t show.

 

* * *

 

Dean said, “That orrery thing…”

“What about it?”

“A stellar temperate zone isn’t that big. They have way too many habitable planets in this system.”

Sam raised his eyebrows.

“And I don’t think the celestial mechanics he’s describing make any sense.  I mean, I need to do some checking before I say for sure, but I don’t think the physics works out.”

Sam’s eyebrows climbed further.

“What?  I watched some PBS back in the day.”

“So how are all those planets inhabitable, then?”

“Assuming this whole adventure isn’t happening in a holodeck somewhere – “

“Assuming.”

“- I’m thinking angels.”

“Angels.  Gotta be.”

“Fucking angels.”

“Rube Goldberg would be proud, though."

 

* * *

 

Dean woke with a start to find River at his bedside again.  He remembered the nightmare this time.  Rather than talk about that, he said, “You’ve been ducking me all day.”

She nestled in beside him.  “Kaylee isn’t a monster.”

He curled himself around her.  “You sure?  ‘Cause she sure looks like one.”

“Certain sure.”

“If you say so.  You left me hanging about this Badger person.”

“If I tell that now, neither of us will sleep tonight.”

“How ‘bout, I let it drop for now and you tell me before you disappear in the morning?”

“Done.”  They lay quiet for a long moment.  “Persephone’s just a by-the-way, you know.  We’re going to Osiris.”

“What’s on Osiris?”

“My mother’s garden.  My mother.”

“That where you’re from?” 

River nodded. 

“How long you been away?”

“Ten years.”

“Long time.”

“Past time, Simon says.”

“Headed home.”  Dean paused.  “You know, if all of this is for real, Sam and I, we can’t get home again.  Like, ever.  Unless this is all a massive hallucination.  It could be a massive hallucination, right?  The angels did that to us a couple times.  It all seemed as real as this does.”

“I could just be a figment of your imagination.  Or we could both be figments of someone else’s imagination.”  She stared at the ceiling for a minute.  “I think I’m real.  But that’s what I’d be like to say, were I not.”  She waggled her eyebrows suggestively.

Dean sighed.  “Tell me about your mother’s garden.”

 

* * *

 

“What she described, their buddy Badger is definitely possessed, probably by a demon.  Could be a really ugly ghost, though.”

“Isn’t that what a demon is?”

“Point.”

 

* * *

 

Dean barely made it past the top-level directories in the ‘Paratext Archive’ before he was across the hall tossing the tablet in Sam’s general direction.  “Time to trade back.”

“What’s up?”

“They got Dad’s service record in there, and I just… I…”

“Got it, man.  Time to trade back.”

“I need a break.  I’m gonna…” Dean hitched a thumb in the direction of the hold.

“Yeah, man, you’re good.”

Jayne followed as Dean passed through the lounge, watching from the hatch as Dean paced off the midpoint between the aft stairs and the main lock and dropped his shirt as a marker. 

“This OK?  I needed some exercise.”

“It’s shiny, long as you don’t get it in your head to go climbing.”

“Yeah, yeah.”  Dean took five easy laps of the hold, then started running suicides.

 

* * *

 

Sam did not tell Dean about finding Jim Murphy’s obituary among the Paratexts, nor about that LiveJournal post from Nancy Fitzgerald’s cousin.  He did bring up Tara Benchley’s head shots and IMDB listing, and the YouTube clips by those Ghostfacers posers, and Barnes’s report on the first Supernatural convention.  Also, that he’d skipped around a little and found a Hunternet message board.  Not much to see, he said.  Mostly seemed to be people looking for a ride or a place to stay, and other people looking to fill berths. 

“Oh, but you’ll love this.  The Edlundites have this whole elaborate liturgical calendar worked out, so they can read through all of the Gospels According to Chuck together on a five-year schedule and have discussion groups about it.  There’s a really detailed order of service for most weeks.  One meeting in middle of the second year, the worship music is _Houses of the Holy_.  Tenth meeting of the fourth year, they play _Heaven and Hell_.  The whole album.”

“They’re using Black Sabbath as devotional music?”

“Yep.”

Dean snickered.

 

* * *

 

This time Dean woke to River climbing out of his bed.

“What’s – “

“Shhh.  I need to see to your brother before he wakes the little ones.”

Dean made to get up.  “I’ll go, he’s – “

“No, balking night-affrights is my job.  Go back to sleep,” River said, and slipped away.

Dean lay back down.  He didn’t sleep again, though, until after the murmurs from across the hall had long since quieted.

 

* * *

 

Sam belatedly realized that ‘Ancillary and Included Works’ included the full movie of _Raiders_.  Being a good brother, he went and found Dean. 

They’d just started _The Blues Brothers_ when Jayne put his head in and insisted that they come join the afternoon rec time.  In the hold they found Zoe running Victor through a hand-to-hand drill while the captain made helpful remarks from the sidelines. 

“You know, the man’s got a point,” Dean said.  “I could definitely use a workout.”

Mal looked them over speculatively.

Sam smiled at him.  “Yeah, some exercise would be good about now.”  Sam glanced at Jayne.  “Be nice to pick on someone my own size for a change.”  Dean snorted.

Turned out Sam and Jayne were well matched. 

Mal kept a running commentary for Victor’s edification, including the points at which each man passed up opportunities to kill or maim the other.

Dean squared up with Mal next.

“Who’d win if you altercated for real?” Victor asked.

“You know better than that,” Mal said.  “‘For real’ means you got to account for all their assets, not just fighting trim.  Gotta account for the tactical, who’s got advantage of situation.  What weapons.  And what’s winning?  Some will take being beat and cut their losses.  Some you best not start with unless you mean to put them down, because they can’t abide to be thwarted.”

“And if it’s a bar fight, the rule is to hit the faces you  _don’t_  know,” Dean said.

“Well, how ‘bout this: who’d win if the loser does tonight’s dishes?”

The answer to that was Mal.  Dean was tired of reading history all day and doing nothing immediately useful.  He put up a fine show, then took an artfully engineered dive that fooled no one.

Sam had a go with Zoe, and won himself the next day’s dishes.

 

* * *

 

Dinner closed with Kaylee announcing that she would be tearing down the hold-level ‘fresher for a maintenance check the next day, so use the one in the galley after breakfast.

Mal headed forward toward his quarters.  Zoe and Kaylee joined the little children in the lounge area, where a lego replica of the Phoenix Gate was a-building.  Victor went forward to collect Simon’s dishes from the bridge.  River and Dean cleared the table.

Once Mal was definitely out of earshot, Sam turned to Jamie.  “I was reading through that Monster Manual of yours, and it seems like no one’s hunting any actual monsters these days.  Ghosts and witches, yes, but no werewolves or ghouls.”

Victor set Simon’s dishes at Dean’s elbow by the sink and returned to the table. 

 “That has been remarked upon,” Jamie said.  “We don’t know why it’s so.  The popular theory is that the general run of weird creatures never looked to leave Earth-That-Was at all.  Those that did leave were ill-suited to the Transit - everything from getting a berth on the ships to surviving stasis to being at length from their spawning-place would have been a trial to one varmint or another.”

“And whatever’s left is canny enough to not be easily caught,” Victor added.

His mother looked surprised to find him at her elbow.  “I thought you were on dishes his week, Victor?”

 

* * *

 

“River said her and Simon are from Osiris…”

Sam tapped some keys.  “Core planet, took the terraforming well.  They got all the amenities, good schools, that sort of thing.”

“Victor mentioned an uncle on Whittier.”

Sam typed some more.  “Kalidasa system.  Lots of fish, it says.  Looks like they’re sort of working class?  Not real poor, but not a big leisure planet.”

“So weird, talking about entire planets like they’re parts of town.”

“Yep.  I didn’t catch where Jayne or Kaylee are from, did you?”

“Nope.  What are we going to do about her, anyway?”

“Nothing, man.  Not ‘til she gives us a reason.”

“Yeah, I guess.  How ‘bout your girlfriend?”

“She was born shipboard.  Raised in transit.”

“Oh.  So I guess you two do have something to talk about.”

Sam rolled his eyes.  “And the captain?”

“Shadow, I think he said.”

Sam went back to the tablet.  “Shadow… orbits the protostar Murphy in the Georgia system… Oh.”

“What?”

“It’s not there any more.  The Alliance hit Shadow with so much overkill that they’re having to re-do the terraforming process.  Should start being habitable again in anther twenty or thirty years.”

“Oh."

“So I guess we got something in common with him, too.”

 

* * *

 

Jamie found Mal on the starboard hold catwalk.

Below, the little children were playing hopscotch with Simon and River.  Victor had slid chest-deep under his orrery and Dean was passing him tools.  An iPod set on the orrery railing was playing on background volume.  Sam and Zoe sat together on the lower aft stairs. 

Jamie reported to Mal the status of the nav systems diagnostic she was running.

When she was done, Mal asked, “So what’s the deep religious meaning of this song?” 

She listened for a moment.  It was the Five Man Electrical Band playing “Signs.”  “Never heard it before,” she said.  “Far as I know it hasn’t got a religious meaning,”

“Thought you knew all this stuff.”

"I know the Testaments, and the Gospels; I know the Ancillary and Included Works. I do not have comprehensive knowledge of all music ever made on Earth-That-Was.”

“Too bad.  They sure play a lot of it.  Hasn’t been a moment’s peace since they got aboard.”

“Ah, now.  It’s too hushful out here for some folk.  Can’t blame a man for wanting homely sounds when he’s far from home.”

Mal made as though to retort, and then just stared at her, caught by a thought.

“What?”

“You really think that’s them down there.  That the heroes of some grizzled goblin-gabble have made their appearance in the hold of my ship.”

“I… you saw those chest scans.”  She turned to look down at her son, who had emerged from the bowels of his project and was listening to River as she traced an orbit among the model planets. “The Gospels tell us miracles do happen, and they happen unto whoever chances to be proximate.  Why not to us?”

“I reckon we’ve had more than our share of excitement already.”

The song changed, to Fogarty covering “Jambalaya.”

“Or maybe you’ve got a trouble magnet aboard.”

“That is a possibility,” Mal said, following Jamie's gaze over the railing.

River, still talking to Victor, gestured extravagantly, a full-body sketch of a comet’s path.

Dean laughed.  Then he caught River’s hand, twirled her neatly, and swept her off into a two-step.

Sam moved quickly to turn the music up.  He returned to Zoe and bowed, courtly, over her hand.  She stood and bowed back.  He steered her up the deck after Dean and River.

An Lee bounced at her daddy’s feet until he set her on the toes of his boots and did his best.  Victor scooped Hobey up and spun him about, more or less in time to the music.

“Stuck in the Middle with You” came up next.  When Dean and River intersected with Victor and Hobey, they executed a haphazard sequence of maneuvers that ended with River leading Victor in the two-step and Dean twirling a giggling Hobey.

Up on the catwalk, Jamie said, “Listen, Mal, Victor uploaded those scans Simon made to the Hunternet.”

“He did what?”

“Yeah.  And the inevitable wank ensued.  Someone started a novena.  Someone else took up a collection.  Someone else accused Victor of willful fakery.  I chimed in that any fakery wasn’t Victor’s, that those were actual scans, taken by Simon Tam, of two men currently aboard Serenity.  Then they accused everyone aboard, severally and jointly, of willful fakery.  I said they’d have to judge for themselves.”

“How much is in the collection?”

“Always got your eye on the ledgers, don’t you?  There’s enough for passage to Santo, and a bit more beyond, in unconditional money.  If they’re willing to dance to all their benefactors’ strings, there’s enough pledged to keep this boat aloft for a year or more.”

“And I’d have to ferry them about.”

“That’s why I’m telling you before I tell them.”

“Let me think on it.”

“Surely.  But those two have signed themselves up to the Hunternet.  They’ll be in the newbie sandbox for a while yet, but it’s only a matter of time ‘fore they catch wind on their own, or Victor lets something slip.”

“I’ll think fast.”

The song changed again.  A guitar wolf-whistled, and a man invited listeners to call him the breeze.  Dean replied, “Oh, hell no.”  He set Hobey down and hustled over to shut the music off.

“Dude, what,” Sam asked.

“Seriously?  No Skynyrd until we’re on the ground.”

Sam frowned from Zoe’s arms.

“I know you saw  _Con Air_ ,” Dean said.

“I didn’t know you boys could dance,” Jamie called down from above.

“Yeah, well, sometimes shitkicker bars are all there is.  You learn to fit in.”


End file.
